You will use view.sel() to get the cursors. This returns a list of regions, since multiple cursors are supported . Anyways, if you want to assume the first cursor, and the beginning of the region you can do the following.

You must be looking at old versions of the api documentation. You want view.run_command. Not view.runCommand. Check the links I provided. Also, as kind of a getting started for plugins, consider going through the following tutorial (link). You may also want to go through some general python tutorials first anyways. Diving straight into plugin development without some understanding of the language can make it more difficult than it needs to be. "dir(variable)" will list the attributes (well I guess it really depends on how the __dir__ method was implemented for that class) for that class. Normally this will show you things like methods and variables associated with that class.

As a future reference, you may want to look at the porting guide, for when you decided to write plugins for ST3 (link). There are some changes to the ST3 api, when compared to ST2, so you should probably look at that as well.